Linux beats NT, but Unix is top for enterprise claims report

British outfit Bloor Research has -- "by coincidence," it says -- intervened in the Linux versus NT wrangle with some tests of its own. The results of these, Bloor says, show that Linux is superior to NT in six of nine categories devised to test the two "from the standpoint of how they operated in practice to support real applications." Bloor's coincidence is a happy one, as the Linux world is currently aflame over the strange tale of the Gartner-MS report. But although Linux seems to do well, Bloor concludes that neither Linux nor NT is "suitable for use as an enterprise level server." This isn't particularly welcome news for Microsoft, which is keen to get NT accepted at enterprise level, but will be of little consequence in the Linux world, where penetration at the highest levels of the enterprise isn't yet an issue. Bloor waspishly notes: "Microsoft is learning a hard lesson with Linux, namely that there is more to life than product marketing. Five years ago there was the NT versus Unix debate, which the Unix community appeared to be losing until Microsoft attempted to tackle the issue of enterprise scalability and convinced no-one." That has left Unix at the top still, and "gave the end users a new set of perspectives, that it was OK to use the right operating system for the job and that the concept of a single OS which could run on the smallest device up to the largest server was inappropriate, not to say unachievable." That's obviously helped make users more receptive to Linux. Bloor's nine categories were Cost/Value for Money, User Satisfaction, Application Support, OS Interoperability, OS Scalability, OS Availability, OS Support, Operational Features and OS Functionality. The operating systems were also ranked as File/Print server, mixed workload server, Web server, mail server, database server, groupware server, data mart, application server and enterprise level server. The outfit seems to want you to buy the report, rather than being more specific about which OS won what, but you can read the gloss, and buy more if you want, here. ®